Here's a 'set it and forget it' backup system which might look rather familiar to the backup solution supplied with a certain well-known fruit based computer.It comes with a configuration interface for KDE's plasma desktop.
Please see the Wiki at https://sourceforge.net/p/ktardis/wiki/Home/ for installation instructions as there are dependencies you might need to install:
(On Kubuntu sudo apt-get install libfilesys-df-perl libdatetime-perl libdate-manip-perl)

Changelog:

Version 0.07 fixes a bug that was preventing the widget from starting
Version 0.06 adds improved error handling and a stats display. NOTE: It also adds a new dependency on libdate-manip-perl.
Version 0.05 adds a real-time display of backup progress and one or to small tweaks.
Version 0.04 fixes a bug where when backing up over SSH, the disc would eventually fill up because the maximum used discspace percentage wasn't working

License:This is SpongWare.
The use of SpongWare is entirely according to the following conditions:
1) You may use it or not, I don't care. Just don't winge at me, I hate that
2) It is provided 'as is'. Nobody is responsible for anything it might or might not do.
3) You may distribute it freely, although I would advise against printing it out and throwing it out of the window, that stuff gets you fined
4) You may alter it if you wish, and distribute the altered version if you wish but you must include this license
5) Before installing this, smile at someone you like
6) There is no rule 6
7) This notice must be included with any copy of this you distribute
8) 'Coding standards' are to be regarded with suspicion.
9) If tardis goes wrong in any way, for example it deletes all your info or perhaps it wipes the entire internet overnight and leaves the world a dead place, nobody is responsible. Deal with it.

btw, wondering if tardis deals with backups that are done in an external drive and at the time of scheduled snapshot the drive is not connected...

Re: neat!

Thanks :)

As for the disc not being connected, I'm working on some improvements in that area. At the moment, IIRC, you won't get any notification if the backup fails for any reason. That's on my to-do-list for the next version.

cron job and new version

Congratulations for the new version!

I tried to update to the new version but unfortunately I didn't get it to run, it seems there is some issue and the plasmoid is not initialized correctly. If I achieve to know about the problem, I'll post it here...

On the other hand, I realized that the cron job tries to find and run TARDIS.pl in a wrong path (at least in my case): /usr/share/kde4/apps/plasma/plasmoids instead of ~/.kde/share/apps/plasma/plasmoids

Re: Re: cron job and new version

Hi, thanks for the report. I'll fix the problem with missing stats.log (actually that was something I knew about and forgot to fix :) )

The issue with it adding the cron job in the wrong place is strange, since the path is read from a system call. I guess on your system it must be returning the system plasmoid path and not the actual installed path. Can you tell me which distro and which KDE version you're using and I'll look into it. Thanks.

As for the /tmp/tardispipe thing - you should only see this if plasma crashes (or if the applet fails to initialise due to a missing stats.log :) ). Unfortunately I can't think of a way round it at all.

Strange, that's exactly what I'm using.

Did you install from the PPA or from a zip file? If you installed from the PPA then the path is correct.

This new version should fail gracefully if the removeable drive is not present, provided the mount point also doesn't exist when the drive is not mounted.

As for roadmaps, I don't do roadmaps :) This is a thing I do because I wanted it and it will get worked on as and when I come up with ideas. Feel free to make feature requests over at the Sourceforge Page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ktardis/

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: cron job and new version

I installed tardis 0.05 from ppa first, but failed, so I tried with zip and worked, so I kept with it also for 0.06.

What is expected behavior if a backup takes too long to finish and new backup is scheduled before the first has finished? I may be in that situation and what I see is that second backup is skipped silently.

About roadmap, yeah, I understand, I was just wondering wether you already have some ideas in mind for future versions...

The nice feature in kup that I mentioned is that it detects when the external drive is connected, and even unmounted if the time since last backup is longer than scheduled, kup starts a new backup (or alternatively, depending on configuration, it asks about starting a new backup). If I have some time, I might take a look to see how easy/difficult it would be to add this feature...

Sorry if I bother you too much, I like tardis a lot, and hopefully my comments can help to improve it a bit

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: cron job and new version

It's no problem, I like receving feedback when it's helpful and constructive.

It sounds as if maybe your system has got confused as to where tardis is installed. Try:
plasmapkg -r tardis (to remove the zip version)
sudo apt-get purge plasma-widget-tardis
then reinstall the zip version. You won't lose your settings by doing this.

If a backup is already running when another one starts the new one will fail silently (The cron job checks to see if another one is running, and exits if so). This is how I want it to work - otherwise you can get into a situation where no backup ever completes because they are constantly being restarted. The difficulty with tardis is that the plasma widget and the actual backup script are completely separate and the amount of control one has over the other is very limited (I wrote the perl backup script long ago). If you know any python then you probably know more python that I do :) so any suggestions are welcome.

Yeah I don't want to get all professional about this with roadmaps and the like. :) To be honest I thought it was finished when I released version 0.03 but then I had more ideas. I don't really know what I'll add next, and that's kind of the fun of it. Feature requests are welcome. The SSH backup idea came from a feature request.

Tardis will detect if the backup destination directory doesn't exist. Thus if your external drive is mounted at /media/External and your backups go in /media/External/Backups then Tardis will report an error if the drive is not connected - the widget icon should change to a red circle with a !.

Re: Possible bug?

No that's not a bug. Using public keys with passwords is not supported.
When you use the 'Backup Now' button, the rsync process is started by the widget, within the KDE desktop environment, so ksshaskpass does work in that circumstance (although I'm actually surprised that it does).
The scheduled backups run as cron jobs - completely outside of the desktop environment - so have no access (or knowledge of) KDE wallet. I don't believe it's possible to make this work.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Possible bug?

It's not that simple - cron cannot access the widget at all as cron runs outside the desktop environment. If I were to use the widget for scheduled syncs I would have to write a complete scheduler in the widget, which would be a lot of work for something I can already achieve using cron.
I suggest you use a public key with no password, this is the supported configuration.

How do you like Plasma 5? The best KDE Desktop ever. Definitely a nice improvement. Not decided yet. Haven't tried it yet. I do not like some of the changes. KDE is taking the wrong way. I am still sticking with KDE 3.5. I have no opinion, but wanted to vote anyway.

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